Light emission diode packages (“LED packages”) are semiconductor devices, which have LED chips acting as light sources. LEDs comprise compound semiconductor materials that produce light when electrically activated. Some examples of some compound semiconductor materials are GaAs, AlGaAs, GaN, InGaN and AlGaInP.
As an LED converts electric energy into light, it is highly efficient and far more durable, and consumes much less electricity than filament bulbs. As the practical use of LEDs gains momentum, they are becoming more widely used in displays such as the indicators for electrical appliances and the backlights for liquid crystal displays in cellular phones.
Conventional LED packages are made of plastic to keep component size and cost down. The plastic shell houses one or more LEDs and is then filled with an optically transparent material to seal and protect the LED from the environment.
One problem associated with conventional plastic LED packages is light leakage. To help make smaller LED packages, the thickness of the plastic package is reduced. As a result, the thinner packaging of the LED allows light leakage through the LED package. Light leakage makes the LED device less efficient, thus requiring more power to achieve a desired brightness, resulting in more power consumption of the device it is in. In addition, as electronic devices become smaller, LEDs must also be smaller. As a result, the smaller LED package has problems with dissipating the heat that is generated by high brightness LEDs.